The Last Fighting Tommy: The Life of Harry Patch, the Oldest Surviving Veteran of the Trenches by Harry Patch with Richard van Emden (Bloomsbury, £7.99)

Harry Patch, who will be 110 on 17 June, is the last British trench fighter of the first world war. His childhood in a sleepy Somerset village is beautifully evoked in this moving memoir as he recalls the sinking of the Titanic, the suffragettes, and seeing his first plane in 1912. In 1917 he was sent to the Western Front to experience the bloody reality of warfare ("It wasn't a case of seeing them with a nice bullet hole in their tunic"), although he avoided killing the enemy (deliberately shooting an attacking German in the leg). In later life, he has been a staunch defender of the hundreds of soldiers who were shot for cowardice during the Great War. "I felt then, as I feel now, that the politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves," he concludes, "instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder." There's a great photo of this independent-minded centenarian giving a V-sign to camera, and not the V-for-victory sort.Ian Pundar

Vom Kriege (On War) is notoriously heavy-going, and almost all that anyone remembers about it is the maxim about war being the continuation of politics by other means. As Hew Strachan points out, On War is all over the place and was left unfinished when Clausewitz succumbed to cholera in 1831. Strachan sees it more as a work in progress and he devotes many dense pages to carefully reconstructing the evolution of Clausewitz's ideas as he struggled to reconcile theory and practice. Clausewitz was a rather gauche Prussian officer who failed to shine on the battlefield, but On War brought him posthumous fame, influencing military strategy right up to 1945 and beyond (Colin Powell has described the book as "still illuminating present-day military quandaries"). Strachan returns On War to its historical context, but also explores its continued relevance. Clausewitz's idea of "absolute war", for example, was based on his experience of Napoleonic warfare, yet as Strachan shows, it took on a whole new meaning during the cold war, when a nuclear showdown seemed imminent. IP

Raja Shehadeh began hill-walking in Palestine a quarter of a century ago, putting paid to the myth espoused by a young Israeli settler who confronted him on one of his rambles that "Arabs don't walk". Undeterred by checkpoints, road blocks and Israeli settlements, he bravely upholds his right to what is known in Arab tradition as sarha - to roam without restraint where the spirit takes you. For most of us the act of walking in the countryside without anger, fear and insecurity, or obsessive political arguments running through our heads, is something we take for granted. Recalling seven walks spanning a period of 27 years, Shehadeh leads us through the devastating changes in his life and its surroundings. Evoking the land as it used to look and feel before the occupation, in the hope of preserving in words the wild splendour of "what has been lost forever", this beautifully written book, which won the Orwell prize, is a sad testament to the slow suffocation of daily life and its simple pleasures for Palestinians in the occupied territories.Aimee Shalan

The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: How a Remarkable Woman Crossed Seas and Empires to Become Part of World History by Linda Colley (Harper Perennial, £9.99)

Born in Jamaica in 1735, Elizabeth Marsh, who was possibly of mixed race, lived an itinerant life in North Africa, America, India and the Pacific, travelling farther by sea than any female contemporary for whom records survive. Charting "a world in a life and a life in a world", Linda Colley's compelling portrait of this barely known woman's turbulent career and the occupations, migrations and ideas of her extended family offers a rare insight into a period of accelerated global change. Although unsophisticated and sometimes prejudiced, Marsh was also intensely shrewd and enterprising, and while being exposed to imperial forces, runaway military violence, modernisation and the strains of family and marriage, she possessed a remarkable capacity to pick herself up in the wake of crisis and try something new. Colley's turns the convention of biography on its head by drawing on Marsh's existence "on a cusp between phases in world history" to deepen our understanding of empire, identity and globalisation; the results are thoroughly engrossing. AS

Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years by David Talbot (Pocket£9.99)

Bobby Kennedy declined to discuss his brother John's assassination publicly, beyond stating that he accepted the Warren Commission's verdict that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. But secretly, Talbot argues, the young US attorney general was "America's first assassination conspiracy theorist", using men he trusted to conduct his own investigation. Brothers brilliantly evokes the Kennedys and their court - a brash yet idealistic fraternity reminiscent of Mad Men and The West Wing - and shows they saw themselves as besieged by internal enemies, who became Bobby's suspects: the mafia, angered by his war on organised crime; the CIA and Cuban exiles, both furious the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion had received only covert US support; Hoover's FBI; and military chiefs who scorned the president as soft on the Soviet threat. Expertly researched through inner-circle interviews, the book suggests a conspiracy was also behind Bobby's murder in 1968, and names two spooks who Talbot believes were part of the JFK Dallas plot. John Dugdale